Indeed. I do wonder if a little constructive self-deception is the necessary cognitive consequence and corollary of a symbolic language that is anything other than perfectly fit for the purpose of unambiguous communication. In this sense, are discoveries really accidental dialects? Feynman diagrams being an (abstract, representational) case in point.
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Healthy Psychological Growth
Healthy psychological growth is quite likely a function of the degree to which a person, or indeed – a civilisation, can successfully negotiate the persistent presence of irreconcilable absence that difference and logical dissonance invokes. In this sense, (both) neurotic obsession and territorial expansionism represent an orientation towards the world that constitutes, in varying degrees, […]
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Is Technology Slowing Down?
Context: Peter Thiel says, forget the hype: Big Tech is slowing down It may be a necessary property of non-trivially sophisticated dynamical systems to oscillate through periods of acceleration and deceleration. Rising complexity in this context is equivalent to acceleration, logically as much as materially; we may quite sensibly speak of self-gravitation in this context. […]
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Technological Civilisation
Context: 94% of the universe’s galaxies are permanently beyond our reach The scale of the cosmos is astonishing. Some estimates infer 2 trillion galaxies and some variations of cosmological hyper-inflation (i.e. early expansion) require an infinite Universe. What is most astonishing of all, though and to anyone who stares into this abyss for longer than […]
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On the value of not knowing…
Context: The Uselessness of Useful Knowledge Epistemological uncertainty is the center of gravity and compelling force (as vacuum) that drives discovery. AI constitutes something of an instance of a much broader principle (or sociotechnical pattern). Inductive utility is a function of the degrees of reduction in uncertainty but this same uncertainty as occluded knowledge faces, […]
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On the topic of not casting stones…
Beyond the most broad brushstrokes of inductive intuition, we should never assume anything about others’ thoughts or intentions and yet find ourselves quite naturally predisposed by endemically limited information to do precisely this. A corollary assumption being that not only are the assumptions we make as essentially and irreducibly metaphysical assertions regarding others most likely […]
Context: Pentagon Wants AI to Predict Events Before They Occur If we abstract the concept of pattern formation from its instances, this becomes plausible. This becomes about not specifically determining what is going to happen but rather and as a function of the resonant (i.e. harmonic) symmetries endemic of and to complex systems, where and […]
An enigma: the shambling, self-propagating golem [let’s not kid ourselves – it’s much more Frankenstein than Jetsons] of mass/social communications systems maximally self-propagates and recursively reproduces itself through precisely the dissonant turbulence that we are now obligated to engage as both an existential threat and aperture of opportunity. How, in other words, to bootstrap, loop […]
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Banksy Shreds the Art Market
Context: Banksy shredded artwork Love is in the Bin sells for artist’s record, which is 20 times more than its pre-shredded price The most consequential information artefacts, entities and systems are those which generate, as conceptual heredity, further artefacts, entities and systems – open and unbounded without closure. What we see in Banksy’s stunt is […]
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Beyond Ideology
Indeed, and similarly – the metric and ticking metronome of those times is so often and deeply inflected by a chronology (as history) measured in, by and as reflexive institutional responses to human being that we have all come to quite normatively expect that all of our catastrophes and our triumphs must necessarily conform to […]
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Emotional Artificial Intelligence?
Context: Vulnerable machines could be smarter ones Complex systems not only natively possess but also harness, amplify and cultivate the uncertainty and ambiguity (as indefinite extensibility) that forever haunts all mechanical or, indeed, analytical approaches to emulating them. A curious symmetry exists within rationality in that it constructs its object as method of reflexive self-validation […]
Context: Guess who’s the biggest investor in self-driving tech? As a general (and perhaps self-evident) observation, note that the sum total of investment at $44 billion would achieve so much more if one company had those resources pooled but that, enigmatically, it is precisely the difference and competition which is driving the acceleration in this […]
